New Blood

Skull Clamp, Dream Probe, Fuerza Bruta, The Investment, and Beep Test

Skull Clamp

Where did you start this project, and why?

Josh: 2016 in Los Angeles, CA. As an outlet in which to channel the various anxieties I experience as a result of living with OCD.

Would you mind sharing more on that? I deal with this myself:

Josh: I am not particularly comfortable with sharing the specifics of my OCD. I will say that when it first got bad, I thought I was losing my mind. It was like somebody had smashed a window in my brain and everything that I had previously taken for granted was suddenly turned upside down. It was pretty agonizing at first, especially before I received a proper diagnosis. But after going into treatment, I thankfully now have a much better handle on my OCD. Regardless, it is something I anticipate that I will struggle with for the remainder of my life.

What are your lyrics about?

Delusions, misanthropy, cosmic horror.

How would you describe your sound?

Josh: A garbage bag filled with bones being crushed with a baseball bat.

Who’s in the bag?

Josh: Me.

What are you up to outside of this?

Josh: Outside of Skull Clamp, I work as an animator. When I’m not drawing or making music, I spend most of my time working on the house that I share with my girlfriend and two dogs.

What’s in the future for you?

Josh: I’m currently working on another demo which will hopefully see release in the fall of 2017.

Dream Probe

Dream Probe (photo by Veronica Mullen)

Date & location formed:

March-ish 2017 in Champaign, IL.

Reason for forming:

Vince (guitar) moved to Champaign from Chicago last year and asked two locals he didn’t really know (Olguie, bass/vocals, and Tyler, drums) if they’d wanna start a band. (This is Olguie’s first band ever!).

What are your lyrics about?

Dream Probe’s lyrics are influenced by Olguie’s experiences as a trans queer immigrant and their relationship with Puerto Rican diaspora.

How would you describe your sound?

Fast hardcore a la early Die Kreuzen/Poison Idea with vocals in Spanish. Mild D-beat adjacent riffs on the side.

What’s in the future for this band?

We are playing The Universe Is Lit fest in the Bay Area in early August and will have a 2nd demo out not long before then. After that some sporadic touring, 7″ next year?

Fuerza Bruta

Date & location formed:

June 2016 in Chicago. We practiced for three weeks and played our first show the same month.

Reason for forming:

Two members are from Brazil (Fortaleza and Londrina), two members are from Chicago, and one is from Birmingham, AL. Every time we would run into each other we would talk about bands from our respective hometowns, as well as old international punk and Oi! other people we knew weren’t into. Most conversations ended with, “we should start a band!” We finally did.

What are your lyrics about?

Our guitarist Matheus writes most of the lyrics, and they’re about observing American politics as a Brazilian living in the US. He writes drafts in Portuguese and then works with Beto to translate them to Spanish.

How would you describe your sound?

We try to cover all of our interests, from the SUB comp of Brazilian HC, to Italian and Japanese Oi! to Basque punk.

What’s in the future for this band?

Releasing a 12” on Foreign Legion Records (run by Ian, who plays guitar), working on new material in the winter for whatever releases come up.

The Investment

The Investment (photo by Kelsey Johe)

Date & location formed:

We formed last August in South San Francisco.

How did your band come to be?

We had all gone to high school together and our bands were fizzling out, and it’s shitty to have nothing to put your energy into. The four of us had vaguely overlapping music tastes and we like hanging out together, we were going to community college, and our singer Alessio had a sick darkwave bass/drum machine solo project at one point, so we decided to build off of that.

What are your lyrics about?

Alienation, finding a sense of identity, social pressures and relationships.

How would you describe your sound?

Music for retail jobs and vacant suburban streets late at night. Post punk or deathrock or darkwave, not sure.

What’s in the future for this band?

Playing shows in San Fran and San Jose here and there, setting up outdoors shows in our area when we find a good outlet and an isolated location. Maybe making a bad music video. Fighting capitalistic tendencies of the music economy. We’re finishing writing our first full length, which we are going to hopefully record and release this summer. Overdubbing some recycled cassettes.